nuke.news

U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon, the Democrat from Tennessee, said he is gaining support for legislation that would bar most imports of nuclear waste into the United States, but he said it likely will have to wait until the next session of Congress. The bill is aimed at keeping EnergySolutions from bringing tons of low-level radioactive waste from Italy and processing it at the company's Oak Ridge facilities -- before disposing of the remains in Utah.

A new study from the Earth Institute at Columbia University says there's more seismic activity around the Big Apple than previously thought. Researchers also say they discovered a new active fault line running from Stamford, Conn., 25 miles (40.2 kilometers) west toward the Hudson River. There, this underground fault intersects with another fault line. Sitting on top of that intersection is the Indian Point nuclear power plant. Scary stuff perhaps? Maybe-but big earthquakes still remain geologically unlikely around New York City.

The entrance to Devonport Dockyard has been barricaded by a group of anti-nuclear campaigners. Police were called to the dockyard's Camel's Head gate in Plymouth at 0720 BST after protesters tied ladders together to block the entrance.

Finland's fifth nuclear power plant, which is currently under construction, has been put on ice pending new studies on the safety of its building methods. The suspension resulted from a report recently issued by Greenpeace that found irregularities in the welding. Although Finland's nuclear safety authority (STUK) rejected many of the claims made by Greenpeace, it will conduct intensive studies on the safety and quality of the welds, which are critical parts of the reactors' structure. STUK's Assistant Director Petteri Tiippana said, "The ministry will ask for a report from us on this issue very soon and we are planning to respond to that within the next week".

When PowerTech Uranium Corp. began drilling exploration wells in northern Colorado, landowners scrambled to gather baseline water quality information and to learn all they could about the in-situ leach uranium mining process being proposed throughout several western states. Then in March, a Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality internal report revealed several years-long regulatory violations at the nation's largest operational in-situ uranium mine, Cameco Corp.'s Smith Ranch-Highland mine north of Glenrock.

Politicians often tout nuclear power generation as a more reliable - and less costly - future solution to America's energy woes, but that idea met an expensive death here in 1981. The region's top Republican lawmaker at the time wasn't happy about it.

The profound shock felt in Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August rippled outward to the rest of the world, less destructive but hardly less psychologically powerful for its distance from its source. Two days after the bombing, an editorial writer for the Australian Courier-Mail was dumbstruck:

Nuclear isomers are back. The controversial field of exploiting excited nuclei, to release atomic energy on demand, was brought low a years back, after some controversial experiments - and some loose talk of creating an "nuclear hand grenade." Now, the field is beginning to thrive once again, as I report in the Guardian. But mindful of earlier controversies, the researchers are keeping a low profile.

Britain continues to favour a tie-up between British Energy and French energy group EDF, Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks said in an interview published Monday. Speaking to the Financial Times last week while on a visit to Lagos, Wicks said a deal with EDF was "the most sensible option" and added that the government thought "that's the natural link".

Former FirstEnergy Corp. engineer Andrew Siemaszko was convicted yesterday on three of five counts of intentionally misleading federal regulators about the danger at the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ottawa County in 2001. The verdicts were the final ones in a seven-year saga that has had national implications for the nuclear industry as it plans for a rebirth to help meet America's rising energy needs.

Under pressure from the public, the Vermont Legislature can close the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The Vermont Legislature will make history in a vote expected as early as January on whether to allow the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant to continue operating after 2012. Never before has a state taken such a vote. "This is a tremendous opportunity for us," said Deb Katz of the Citizens Awareness Network, an antinuclear group based in Shelburne Falls. "But it's not going to be easy."

he Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave conditional approval to a plan by the state-owned Taiwan Power Co. (Taipower) to build a temporary dump site in Taipei County to dispose of spent nuclear fuel rods from the neighboring No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, despite strong protest from the area's residents yesterday.

Rosatom head Sergei Kiriyenko has signed a decree for the construction of a nuclear power plant in the Kaliningrad region, the country's atomic energy company announced Wednesday. Design of the two-reactor plant is to be completed by the end of 2009, and the first of the two 1,200-megawatt reactors is to come on line in 2015, Rosatom said in a statement. St. Petersburg's Atomenergoproyekt institute will design the facility, while construction will be carried out by Energoatom at an estimated cost of 5 billion euros ($7.4 billion).

The 1950s-era Tower Shielding Reactor was defueled a few years ago, and since then it's remained in a "surveillance and maintenance" mode. There's no date yet for final cleanup, but DOE said it will be a part of the proposed Integrated Facilities Disposition Program, which still awaits funding.

French nuclear group Areva is facing a 50 percent rise to the cost of building the world's first next-generation pressurised water reactor in Finland, the business daily Les Echos reported Thursday. The cost of constructing the plant at Olkiluoto has risen from three billion to 4.5 billion euros (6.7 billion dollars), the paper reported citing an unidentified source.

Claims of substandard welding at the construction site of Finland's third commercial nuclear reactor have led to a request for a police investigation. An engineer serving as deputy project chief for the construction company Bouygues feels that a current affairs programme on YLE TV-2 libelled his company with claims of substandard welding at the site.

Information about the new Visaginas Nuclear Power Plant (VNPP) project is now available at the Internet website "www.vae.lt"; the website provides information about the project's preparatory work, career and business opportunities, as well as expert opinions. The website is in Lithuanian, there is also a shorter version in English.

The last five strontium-fuelled lighthouses along the Barents Sea coast are now being replaced with solar technology. All together, 153 of the radioactive lighthouses have been removed as part of a Russian-Norwegian project. Since year 2000, Murmansk regional authorities have together with the Norwegian Finnmark county governor removed all the radioactive lighthouses (RITEGs) from the Russian Barents Sea coast. As many as 85 of the lighthouses were located in Murmansk Oblast, while 68 of them were in Arkhangelsk Oblast.

In August 1975, somebody scored a sweet deal. That summer, a transport company paid $2 a barrel to dump 2,353 drums into a Ephrata landfill. There were no records of what was in the barrels, which since then have rotted and leaked toxic chemicals into an underlying aquifer, according to this story by Michelle McNiel in the Wenatchee World .

In the massive discussion that's starting to shape the future of electric power in the state for decades to come, an executive of Florida Power & Light insists that the best way to reduce greenhouse gases is to define nuclear as a renewable energy source. By doing that, FPL has told regulators it can greatly speed up the state's push to combat global warming by having 20 percent of all power come from renewable energy by 2030, rather than by 2050, which is the timeframe now being discussed by regulators.